Reincarnation | Page 3

and ready to devour mankind.
The key to the secret lies in Evolution, which can be accomplished only
by means of the continual return of souls to earth.
When once man learns that suffering is the necessary result of divine
manifestation; that inequalities of conditions are due to the different
stages which beings have reached and the changeable action of their
will; that the painful phase lasts only a moment in Eternity, and that we
have it in our power to hasten its disappearance; that though slaves of
the past, we are masters of the future; that, finally, the same glorious
goal awaits all beings--then, despair will be at an end; hatred, envy, and
rebellion will have fled away, and peace will reign over a humanity
made wise by knowledge.
Were this modest work to hasten forward this time by a few years, we
should feel sufficiently rewarded.
The subject will be divided into four chapters:
(1) The Soul and the bodies.

(2) Reincarnation and the moral law.
(3) Reincarnation and science.
(4) Reincarnation and the religious and philosophical concensus of the
ages.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: This Council came to the following decision:--Whosoever
shall teach the pre-existence of the soul and the strange opinion of its
returns to earth, let him be anathema!]

REINCARNATION
A STUDY IN HUMAN EVOLUTION
CHAPTER I.
THE SOUL AND THE BODIES.
In a book dealing with the resurrection of bodies and the reincarnations
of the Soul, a chapter must be devoted to the fundamental elements of
the question.
We will give the name of Soul to abstract Being, to the Unknown, that
unmanifested Principle which cannot be defined, for it is above all
definition.
It is the Absolute of Western philosophers, the Parabrahm of the
Hindus, the Tao of the ancient sages of China, the causeless Cause of
all that has been or ever will be manifested in concrete time and space.
Some feeble idea of it may perhaps be obtained by comparing it with
electricity, which, though the cause of various phenomena: heat,
movement, chemical action, light, is not, per se, any one of these
phenomena, undergoes no modification from their existence, and

survives them when the apparatus through which they manifest
disappears.
We shall set up no distinction between this Soul, which may be called
the universal Soul, and the individual soul, which has often been
defined as a ray, a particle of the total Soul, for logically one cannot
imply parts to the Absolute; it is illusion, limitation on our part, which
shows us souls in the Soul.
Bodies are "aspects" of the Soul, results of its activity--if, indeed, the
Infinite can be said to be either active or passive; words fail when we
attempt to express the Inexpressible. These bodies, or, more precisely,
the varied forms assumed by force-matter[2] are aspects of the Soul,
just as light or chemical action are aspects of electricity, for one cannot
suppose anything outside of infinite Being, nor can anything be
imagined which is not a manifestation of the abstract Whole.
Let us also define Consciousness.
Taken absolutely, it is Being, the Soul, God; the uncaused Cause of all
the states which, in beings, we call states of consciousness.
This limited consciousness may be defined as the faculty a "centre of
life" possesses of receiving vibrations from its surroundings. When, in
the course of evolution, a being is sufficiently developed to become
conscious of a separation between its "I" and the object which sends it
vibrations, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. This
self-consciousness constitutes the human stage; it appears in the higher
animals, but as it descends the scale of being, gradually disappears in
non-individualised consciousness.
In a word, absolute Consciousness is one, though, as in the above
example, it is manifested differently, according to the differences in the
vehicles which express it in the concrete world in which we live.
The Soul, per se, is beyond the reach of beings who have not finished
the pilgrimage of evolution. To know it, one must have attained to the
eternal Centre, the unmanifested Logos. Up to that point, one can only,

in proportion as one ascends, feel it in oneself, or acknowledge it by
means of the logic which perceives it through all its manifestations as
the universal Mover of forms, the Cause of all things, the Unity that
produces diversity by means of the various vehicles which serve it as
methods of expression.
Science says that intelligence, or, to be more generic, consciousness,
results from the action of matter. This is a mistake.
Consciousness does not change in proportion as the cells of the body
are renewed; rather it increases with physical unconsciousness, as in
somnambulism.
Thought is not the fruit of the brain; it offers itself to the latter, ready
made, so to speak; the loftiest intellectual or